Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.

In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, from the point of view of labs doing it, like there’s this great person doing a lot of work and they deserve this new opening the lab fought to get budgeted.)

The sad part is that some poor naive young researchers will prepare and cross the country to interview (hopefully now there will be more video calls) not knowing that the call is already custom fitted to someone in the lab.

The fun part is that, as there has to be a majority of external jury in the commission appraising the candidates, the external jury sometimes don’t even know that the call is rigged and pick another, clearly better candidate Then, a few months later the candidate starts their new job and is really puzzled at the attitude of this one person… the one that was supposed to win the call

When the French government puts out an EU wide bid for something (As is the rule in the EU), the bid will be won by a French company. Every. Single. Time. And it's not by accident.

Finland, on the other hand, is playing things stupid.

We've had cases where a city's laundry services was won by an Estonian company(!) because they were the cheapest. They actually shipped all laundry 300km+ south, over the bay and to Estonia. Wash it and send it back. For some reason the people handling the bid were all suprised_pikachu.png when it turned out the arrangement didn't work AT ALL.

That's all down to knowing how to write the bid so that the winner will also be the best.

Joke aside, it seems one of the winner of the Finland->Estonia washing contract is actually a Finnish national that incorporated a company in Estonia: https://www.aripaev.ee/article/2011/2/22/soome-pesupesijad-u...

We are talking about permanent positions guaranteed for life with fantastic perks. They're extremely competitive to get.

When a permanent position is opened, it's often for a position that's been contracted out for a while.

Want to hire the contractor who's been doing the job perfectly for 2 years? It's simply not possible because of the law above. Gotta advertise the job nationwide and run formal interviews. An interview panel will run interviews and pick whoever they like (it takes months).

It's not as rigged as the poster makes it out to be. The panel is 5+ random people selected among a very large company. They don't know that the position is tailored to someone and they couldn't care less either way, they're all people with a cushy position guaranteed for life, no favor to give. (It's really the opposite of Russia/China for those doing the comparison).

It's rigged in the sense that if there was somebody doing the job for year, they're probably more qualified than you are.

This rule exists to prevent middle managers from doing empire building and growing their headcount indefinitely. It works as you can see above where a better person was chosen.

(I should clarify that I’m fully in favor of immigration programs that serve to increase the density of highly qualified individuals in the US and to fill positions which would otherwise go vacant. If as a small side-effect, those programs depress wages via increased supply, that’s still an excellent trade for the population. I am not in favor of visa programs substantially/primarily aimed at decreasing wages.)

That is why George W Bush and older generation Republicans always supported legal AND illegal immigration. Their constituents were the businesss that thrived and made more profits from a cheaper laborforce.

The Democrats were historically hostile to immigration because their base was the working class. Now that Wall Street and Big Business has gone Democratic since Bill Clinton and the New Democrats there will be more supply of labor and thus lower wages ceteris paribus.

Today I learned another useful latin expression.

It is called L-1 Intra-Company Transfer Visa: L-1A and L-1B for transfer of managers and specialists

https://workpermit.com/immigration/usa/employees-guide-us-im...

The job postings are useless, if you want to work there what you need is an introduction (someone to give your CV to a lead that needs hands on deck). Then 2 to 3 months later a job posting with an almost complete copy of your CV will appear and they’ll hire you.

Under the first bullet in the screendump in the article it says:

* Experience from personnel management positions and documented good leadership qualities (Here Henric lacks the clear experience why I think it should be moved to meritorious)

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...

Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.

edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.

However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...

For a while my entire job ended up writing proposals and all the related nonsense for federal an state government contracts. I did not like that one bit.

However spending week after week trying to divine the meaning behind phrases and terms.

It shortly became apparent that some parts of the government would consistently have requirements only applicable to one vendor.

That saved a lot of time since I could just skip them whenever they came out.

These types of «arrangements” often go all the way to congress promised pork for donors and secure job for voters.

If I have given the impression I was doing all the work myself that is not intended. We had a big team of all sorts of disciplines

Meanwhile auditors (unless burned out) would love to get the contractors and buyer staked in court, but technically all checkboxes on the checklist are checked (pun intended) and there's no obvious better candidate to use as counter example.

The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI.

I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either.

Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.

I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1].

Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation.

Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi...

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...

If you can’t get change orders to cover your budget overages, your company loses money.

I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.

I guess this could happen with hardware too. But adding more features is much easier in software. Marketing can then argue that it makes a certain product “better”.

No corruption to see here folks, move along.

Because it is so difficult to launch a project and provision the requisite infrastructure in the federal government due to various IT regs and laws and subsequently obtain an Authorization To Operate (ATO) in a timely fashion an existing platform is routinely sole sourced especially when speed is necessary.

Why? This is both legit and utter bs. Legit: the fed gov actually attempts to protect a persons’ private data. BS: after the drain of the acquisition process (led by non-technical folks), ATO, slide decks to more non-technical management (Deloitte and their peers crush this), the competent folks find other jobs either in or outside gov that free their creativity.

Positive: groups like USDS are reducing the drain, but once an exec gets burned they go back to checkbox management and shun the learning organization culture that has made tech the anti-thesis of this type of acquisition in other sectors.

*edited misspelling to show gov tries to protect not product privacy data

The deeper lesson is to look at incentives: where things go well, the structure encourages the outcome society wants. When they’re misaligned, you get global climate change or the American healthcare system underperforming our peers at whole number cost and stress multiples.

The British vaccine is being rolled out by public bodies and is working pretty good indeed (half a million doses a day).

Meanwhile our track and trace system, misnamed "NHS Track and Trace", is, despite the name, almost completely outsourced to private industry (and barely even speaks to the NHS). It's universally acknowleged to be an absolute mess.

Every single piece of electronics I own was bought that way.

How else would you buy stuff without being influenced by some subconscious bias caused by some stupid ad?

He just explained he picks the cheapest item in some database based on some specs.

This is how hospital software is handled (at least in Finland). The one making the decisions is the head doctor in the hospital, because they have the most power.

They know fuck-all about software and fuck-all about the day to day work of the nurses and doctors who need to use the product every day.

And this is pretty much how we ended up giving Epic Systems 774 million for their MUMPS-flavoured piece of shit rebranded as "Apotti". And the project - started in 2015 - isn't even done, nor bug-free yet. The American model of everything being cost first didn't fit the Finnish model of medicine - to the surprise of no-one outside of the organisation.

It was so bad that other cities refused to use it and went with their own solutions instead of using Apotti.

That was our nickname for our worst customer. Some wannabe nerd promoted to CIO, probably to keep him away from patients and the other staff.

His most substantial contribution was divining the precise shade of the highlight color used by our theme.

Our "portal" had labs, scripts, meds, notes, referrals, and on and on. Stuff like lab reports were industry standard (we had domain experts on our team). Dr Corn Flower had opinions on all of it. Not detail too small to argue about. Every pixel mattered.

We eventually got to the point where two team member's full time job was babysitting Dr Corn Flower, while others were permitted to do real work (skunkworks style).

And that was just one hospital. We had dozens of other customers, and 100s of partners.

https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/anduril/

Basically, build first at the VC’s risk and then deliver a finished product to Gov.

So enevitably requirements are tailored to what I want. It seems someone wanted Deloitte, why (and how expensive was the dinner) is another question.

Well how the hell do we have a £40M contract for supply of laptops to schoolkids filled by a noname laptop supplier using the jankiest (really low quality, really poor spec) laptops worth maybe £100 but being charged to the taxpayer at >£300 each.

School IT people are getting them delivered, a lot are broken, and the cost of repair is given as more than the cost of buying _retail_ a better replacement.

I don't know how these people live with themselves, ripping off the taxpayer and lumping in-need schoolkids with poor equipment.

Anyone in that decision chain could spend an hour reading "budget laptop" articles on trusted websites, then look on the website of a high-street supplier for a top price. Boom, saved the taxpayer £20M.

Mind you at least something was delivered, current UK government tenders appear to be typified by non-delivery by completely inexperienced companies for costs well above market.

They already exist. Mysterious why CDC didn't use them. Maybe they are hollowed out after the Trump years. I know I wouldn't have stuck around.

However, if a large outsourcer like Deloitte gets the gig, they should have the right experience and knowledge to work with the customer to determine what they really need/want, and to steer them through the whole process. They should also ensure they use best practices, such as tests. If a company fails here.

I think there is blame to go round on both sides.

Imagine hiring web developers with only HR on the interview loop, no manager or team rounds.

Imagine if you had to describe in exact detail every possible aspect of a mission to Mars in 1940. You are guaranteed to wind up causing the death of everybody involved, because there is an enormous amount of research standing between where you are now, and having enough information to create a workable design.

The real problem is that the nature of the contracting system doesn't allow for open-ended / minimum-viable projects with iterative development, you have to do your best to write the requirements then throw it over the wall and hope for the best. Of course you're going to wind up with a mess.

Within a year or two the good staff end up working at the consulting shops and influence their former employers

1. competent technologists

2. competent technology managers who can communicate to the suits who are in charge of the budget that these things are needed for a functional quality tech environment

#2 is a much rarer skill than #1, and those people will get paid way more and will have to deal with way less BS working in tech companies than government positions.

At some point it will become obvious that software complexity is a national security issue. I feel that point still hasn't arrived, for whatever reason. Perhaps the realization has arrived, but those offering the realization have biased the reports to favor themselves (i.e. Deloitte, et. al.)

"U.S. national security increasingly relies on software to execute missions, integrate and collaborate with allies, and manage the defense enterprise. The ability to develop, procure, assure, deploy, and continuously improve software is thus central to national defense."

We already know it's a national security issue. Nothing is done about it.

Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year. Shame the price has been so high.

When people say privatizing things could be a solution, they don't usually mean "take tax money and award it through a no-bid contract to a private company for laughable reasons which could be either stupid or corrupt, your choice". At least if those aren't the people who are getting no-bid contracts, those people mean exactly that.

> Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year

You sound like somebody outside CDC on purpose went and made CDC look bad. As far as I can see here, CDC did it to itself - and it's way not the only messup they had recently, they also totally bungled covid tests rollout. There seems to be serious trouble there, and if they think they will be excused because of the pandemic - they unfortunately may be right, but this only means the rot will continue.

This is what is being referred to when a politician used the words "public/private partnership.'

By paying lump sums you are basically encouraging your contractor to screw you over. You should compensate them based on metrics that align with your goals. For example, pay $1 (random number) for each vaccinated citizen.

I think government is just sitting on the extreme end of bloated bureaucracy, with everthing defense related taking the cake.

This is combined with how various voter-friendly "cheap government" initiatives go on for all kinds of internal purchases, not just big dollar projects like this.

Printers that needs servicing all the time because "cheapest bid" means you have low-quality shady consumables used.

Cars that end up constantly in service because the provider is cheap and thus couldn't do the right job servicing a Land Rover Discovery 2, taking away critical machine for reaching accident sites for aviation accident investigation.

Purchase of new cars for the same org and purpose - the freshly elected government leaked "appropriate" story to one of the newer tabloids to make it look like excess that they are curbing.

I still tell the story of SCAAI investigator buying a plane ticket for international flight because office responsible for finances in appropriate ministry refused to arrange diplomatic courier. So an investigator booked an international flight, left the plane, gave the CD full of confidential data to his local counterpart, turned 180 and went back to the same plane back.

The problem comes in when things like this happen - that a company forces itself to be the only option through unnecessary infrastructure and proprietary software in the public space.

The biased/corrupt person that ultimately is forcing the decision gets their pick, but doesn't face the full consequences of their decision because "hey it was a bidding, everyone got to offer". People making multi-million dollar decisions should be exposed with plenty of skin in the game for things to ever not be as rigged as they currently are.

Government, public offers, invitation to tender must not only play by the cheapest but also by the long term impact that changing contractor every 4, 5 years has on their own management and system. This is getting as absurd and stupid. Force contract to use standard/boring technology and leverage a large market of companies for support. Being the cheapest never was a fair decision maker.

In software world things change so fast that someone with 6 years of experience developing software will not have enough experience with newest tools, languages, methods, etc. Newer graduates with experience is newest applications in their resume get hired and they sometimes lack real development experience.

Building and delivering software is not like building a road or sidewalk where technology does not change by much every year or decade. They still construct sidewalks like they did say 100 years ago.

So major software contractor's success is pretty much random depending on who gets hired and how good the chosen packages are for the given application and how experienced are the staff in putting it together and having good test specs.

Another problem in software world is that software developers move to new IPOs and so the staffs are ever more transient. Government jobs with complex hiring practices are actually becoming unattractive to developers.

They don't even seem to be saying "because Deloitte was successful in the past". It's literally saying "because they're the only ones who have access to their proprietary system that we already locked ourselves in too.... they get the business".

"...so the staffs are ever more transient". Yeah, there's some idea that "company X" does ABC. The people at company X do ABC, but you are at the whim of institutional knowledge and tribal info systems within that company. The superstars who made ABC work 4 years ago may all be gone, and the current people are trying to make a name for themselves by making 'The New Process' so any success from ABC isn't at all guaranteed to translate to your new project.

Nothing happens for no reason. Few cases of success in big projects in the past must have got them in. History has impact on future.

Clearly not. Unless... the requirements were garbage to begin with?